Let’s Kick them while they’re Down

Photo: Small scale, low tech farming in Central Tanzania

In addition to buying up huge tracts of land in developing countries to produce biofuels for Western car drivers, there is also substantial investment and speculation in buying land to produce food for over consuming Westerners.

Countries like Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, which are currently having trouble growing enough food for their citizens, are easy targets. People are desperate and land is cheap. Governments of developing countries (rather unnecessarily) entice foreign investors with tax breaks and other incentives. Countries currently at war are easier targets and the land is even cheaper. Ethiopia is welcoming investors right now, as is Sudan.

Of course, to offer incentives to their own farmers in order to improve food security would be a threat to a ‘free-market’, they can only give these incentives to foreigners. Go figure; or ask someone at the World Bank or International Monetary Fund (IMF). These countries used to assist their food producers but ‘structural adjustment policies’ and other loan conditions have ensured that they don’t do this any more. Hence the current food shortages.

These investors will be able to bring in heavy machinery and developing country governments will help them get rid of the majority of people who presently farm the land. A handful of people may be employed, perhaps only for a short time. This sort of investment requires minimal labour costs.

For Western investors, it’s a matter of finding very good returns. They emphasize the need to feed people but they are not talking about feeding people who are currently short of food. They will be exporting their produce to the West. Some of it may even return in the form of ‘food aid’, who knows?

It’s hard to know where to start listing the disadvantages of this sort of land grabbing: people will be dispossessed of their land and livelihoods; they will be rendered unemployed and homeless and forced to move to overcrowded slums; land will, eventually, be destroyed by overuse of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides; the water supply will be reduced as crops are exported; remaining water will become contaminated; whole ecologies will be exterminated, irreversibly; the list goes on and on.

This ‘investment’ by the private sector is creating the development problems of the future. Development money is, effectively, subsidizing their activities. So those who object to aid money being poured into developing countries, and possibly misused, should take note of who is benefiting. If we really give a dam about food insecure peoples being able to feed themselves, we should be spending money on helping them to adopt sustainable agricultural practices that are appropriate for small scale farms, the sort of farms that the vast majority of people in developing countries currently operate.

Are we really going to live on food that is grown in countries where people are starving? Sphere: Related Content

Public-Privateer Partnerships

One often hears of Public Private Partnerships (PPP), as if the public sector and the private sector get together and do something that is of mutual benefit, but that's far from the truth. Any PPPs I've come across involve the public sector handing over large sums of money to private sector enterprises and getting nothing in return but demands for even larger sums of money. At the same time,the public sector still has to pump additional public money into the services that they were, ostensibly, paying the private sector to provide.

Well the World Bank has always been very keen on PPPs. They give loans to desperate governments with certain conditions attached and those conditions often include the privatization of things like public utilities, for example, water. This happened in Tanzania with a company called Biwater. They screwed up so badly in the UK that the World Bank felt they could make an even bigger mess in developing countries, which they obligingly did.

They and other wealthy operators continue to asset strip, steal, threaten, maim and kill in various ways in other countries. And with generous handouts from the World Bank in addition to what they can extort from the most impoverished people on earth, they will probably continue to do so for many years to come. Sphere: Related Content

Penetrative Theft

Photo: A view of Mwanza, North Western Tanzania.


Tanzania is the third largest producer of gold in Africa. Does this mean that the country receives lots of revenue from this massive industry and that hundreds of thousands of people are employed extracting gold? No, most people are poor and only a few thousand people are employed in the industry now.

In fact, the government gives so many tax breaks and other benefits to foreign miners that even politicians, who usually make lots of money even when their electorate remain poor, don't make that much from gold. Well, I'm sure they do ok, but for some strange reason, they seem happy to watch the country's gold being raided by these foreign operators.

In addition to demanding low royalties from foreign companies, the country is losing out because gold had traditionally been labour intensive. Now, with high technology extractive processes, employment is minimal, most of the big earners are not Tanzanian and the majority of workers are paid very low wages. Several hundred thousand former artisan miners are unemployed as a result of these foreign companies taking over.

Much of the Tanzanian government's thinking on the industry seems to have been shaped by the bizarre strictures of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, who insist on low taxes, low royalties, incentives for foreign 'investment' and various de facto subsidies that are not available to any Tanzanians who might otherwise be able to get into the industry. As a result, Tanzanians haven’t a hope of being to compete, competition only being a good thing when the odds are stacked against them, it seems.

The biggest operators in Tanzania, Canadian Barrick Gold and South African AngloGold Ashanti, appear to be making huge amounts of money by these various deceits. But those who can do anything about this don't seem interested in intervening. The above international financial institutions don’t actually see any problem in such iniquities. The Canadian and South African governments could intervene, though they may not see this as being in their interest. But I don't understand why the Tanzanian government has for so long failed to right this terrible injustice.

In addition to this assault on the Tanzanian economy and the welfare of Tanzanians, the international financial institutions, multinational extractive operators and others involved don't seem to have any respect for democracy or human rights. In the long term, extractive industries cause immense environmental damage, the consequences of which will be borne by Tanzanians.

National and international laws need to protect people and prevent multinationals from destroying whole communities and defrauding sovereign countries. They should also prevent irreversible destruction of environments, which will probably affect future generations more than present generations. Rich country governments who are profiting from these industries, along with the powerful but unelected and unaccountable members of international financial institutions, also have a duty to see that these laws are properly policed.

Sadly, Tanzania is not the only country in Africa where this sort of exploitation is taking place. In fact, most African countries with natural resources that are highly valued by the West are being similarly plundered: Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, the list goes on. But Tanzania is one of the few where Western governments didn't have to oversee a war in order to take what they wanted. For some reason, the Tanzanian government is far more compliant that some other African administrations. Sphere: Related Content